Credit: Sony Pictures AnimationSpider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) was perfectly fine, losing almost 100 employees for their movie due to terrible conditions.
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After facing months of VFX artists exposing Hollywood and Marvel for terrible working conditions, you would think other studios would listen and do better. Obviously, Sony didn’t get the memo while working on Across the Spider-Verse.
Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) goes on a new Multiverse adventure with Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) to try to save his family and risks ruining the Spider-Verse. Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac) does everything he can to stop Miles, but this story is about more than your typical Spider-Man.
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This movie has over 200 named characters, focusing on what it takes to be Spider-Man and comparing other variants to Miles. Due to the Multiverse playing a considerable role, Miles gets to explore several different universes in the movie, allowing fans to see a lot of visuals, but it wasn’t easy to create.
Sony hired around 1,000 workers to finish this film, with a 14-year-old helping create the LEGO Spider-Man scene. While the movie was worked on for years, Across the Spider-Verse had several employees burned out over the extensive hours and revisions.
Crazy enough, Amy Pascal, one of the more well-known execs to work on Spider-Man movies, claims that this level of revisions is to be expected and that workers should be prepared for the onslaught of work:
“One of the things about animation that makes it such a wonderful thing to work on is that you get to keep going until the story is right. If the story isn’t right, you have to keep going until it is.”
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Pascal also shares for workers who were unhappy with the revisions and conditions, “I guess, Welcome to making a movie.” Sony didn’t have a problem with the amount of workers who left the projects. Other artists shared that since revisions were happening all the time, there’s a good chance those workers who left had their entire work from the movie erased due to newer edits.
It’s bizarre that Sony and Pascal would take the stance that movies like Across the Spider-Verse need all of those revisions to get the story right, and that’s why the workers need to redo their VFX shots and stay super late each day. Marvel Studios has already seen the consequences of lower-quality CGI and realized that their current release schedule will only create more disasters. Beyond the Spider-Verse has no hope of releasing anytime soon; if it does, don’t expect it to be a masterpiece.
Do you think Sony should change their guidelines for VFX workers? Let Inside the Magic know what you think!